Backyard Ecology™

Clovers are often suggested for lawn alternatives or for incorporating into our yards to make them more pollinator friendly. Clovers can also play important roles in agriculture either in grazing syst...

25 Feb 20211h 6min

Like many people, I grew up with a healthy…. apprehension (ok, fear) of wasps. And, of course, I've seen all the memes on social media vilifying wasps and calling them names that I'm not going to repe...

18 Feb 20211h 4min

Vernal pools are a special type of shallow wetlands that fill with snow melt and rain in late fall through early spring, then dry up sometime during the summer. Because they dry up, they are sometimes...

11 Feb 20211h 2min

The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual citizen science / community science project hosted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Audubon, and Birds Canada. This international project takes place all o...

4 Feb 202141min

We're lucky in the eastern U.S. because bodies of water are pretty common. For most of us, if we don't have access to a creek, stream, river, pond, etc. in our immediate backyards, then we likely have...

28 Jan 20211h 9min

Growing native plants has grown in popularity over the last couple of decades. This has led to an increased demand for native plant seeds. However, many of us have never really stopped to think about ...

21 Jan 20211h 3min

Land snails???? Come on, how do they fit with Backyard Ecology? True, land snails aren't the most charismatic organism in our yards and communities, so it would be easy to just write them off and igno...

14 Jan 202156min

Many of us grew up hearing about the decline of the old growth forests and their impacts on neotropical songbirds and other wildlife. I think this was especially true for those of us who grew up here ...

7 Jan 202154min